We have all our ancestry and their memories inside us. Yesterday in rehearsal Courtney said to me, ‘when I read this line, I realize it’s Lil’s husband from part three!’ She said in the first section she was referring to herself as a child and later on it’s her adult self. And to me, that’s what bringing this poem alive does.

“Shakespeare is beautiful when you read it, more beautiful when you hear it, but when you experience it through a play it takes on a whole ‘nother level. And while it’s wonderful we have technology now we didn’t have back then, we’re still disconnected.” Adler says that theatrical adaptation of the five-part poem, which shifts point-of-view between an ambiguous speaker and numerous characters who emerge and dissolve back into its bleak and sodden atmosphere, both gives life to Eliot’s imagery and has allowed the performers to unearth subterranean connections in the text. Peyton Hooks and Josh Hogan finished their college careers online. One of the lines is ‘I can connect/Nothing with nothing.’ That’s what COVID was like.

Especially with everything happening in Ukraine and around the world. “Not just the coinciding of the anniversaries. “It felt like the right piece to wrap up this whole crazy thing,” Adler says, referring to the coronavirus pandemic and so much more. Adler restages CDE’s “The Wasteland” at Ebenezer Lutheran Church May 5 through 20-a week behind the cruelest month, but still timely for the anniversary of a poem that permanently scattered shards of language into our collective consciousness one-hundred years ago. Eliot’s “The Waste Land.” For Ellyzabeth Adler, founder and artistic director of Chicago Danztheatre Ensemble, Eliot’s heap of broken images is a longtime literary favorite and the source material for the first dance theater piece she created for her company twenty-one years ago, fresh out of college and before she knew she even wanted a company. And so then, emerging from what seems like years of winter, dazed and blinking in spring sunlight, surveying the wreckage and its reverberations, we stumble again upon T.S.

If time is indeed a flat circle, 2023 might mark a recurrence of sorts. The aftermath of a pandemic that took the lives of millions a global war that shook humanity’s conception of its own self-destructive power to the core exploding wealth disparity of soon-to-be catastrophic proportions.

Peyton Hooks, Courtney Reid Harris, Ellyzabeth Adler and Joshua Hogan of Chicago Danztheatre Ensemble in “The Wasteland”/Photo: Matthew Gregory HollisĬentennials are often an occasion for comparison, but there’s something about 1923-the American condition and general state of the Western world-that rhymes awfully well with our current moment.

Ts eliot the wasteland